Whether you attended... or not the webinar we organized with Actito a few days ago (the replay is available here) we wanted to share with you the answers we have given to the many questions asked.
So here they are, in bulk, in no particular order 😉
"How to avoid looking like a spammer? What can be really prohibitive in the content of an email for example? Bonus question: how to avoid falling into the Gmail promotion tab 😉 ? "
A vast question
It is important to understand that there is no content to avoid universally. Spam filters are very dynamic and follow the "news" of spam. This means that according to the trends, the big campaigns of spammers, the contents considered problematic evolve as we go along.
So it is not always possible to anticipate which content will be problematic. However, it is always necessary to differentiate yourself from spammers, and this will be done by a few simple rules: target intelligently, segment, personalize your mailings, have content that is relevant to the recipient.
Regarding the Gmail promo tab, it depends on which emails land in the promo tab. If they are commercial emails, only a drastic improvement of the engagement may allow you to get out of it... and still. If it's service emails, then you'll have to try to help Google to differentiate your different types of emails, for example by using different subdomains to send them. We also published an article on this subject.
"Hello and thank you! Should I choose a dedicated or shared IP to optimize my deliverability? In which cases should you choose one or the other?"
We have published an article on this subject some time ago and which could interest you.
"What are the right keywords to put in the email subject line to have a good open rate? And what is the optimal length of the email subject line to have a good open rate?"
The basic element for an object to encourage opening is that there is an action verb in it! Descriptive objects are rarely the most effective. But this subject is very broad and also depends largely on your audience and the messages/actions you want to convey. So the most important thing is to test and compare the performance of the campaigns between them.
The length of the object is not really an element that affects the opening performance. In general, we prefer 6 to 7 words maximum, but the most important thing is that the elements which will trigger the opening (which are most interesting for understanding the message) are placed at the beginning of the object.
"Complicated to make shipments over several days when you launch a commercial operation! What are the delivery days for better deliverability? "
It is true that it is not always easy to spread out your mailings, but in certain situations, it is still essential, especially if you have to heat up or "warm up" a reputation. Nevertheless, in the long term, what is most important is to have regular sending frequencies while avoiding having peaks that occur randomly.
The best sending day is the one on which your recipients will be most responsive to your campaigns. So it's more a question of marketing than deliverability.
Need help?
Reading content isn't everything. The best way is to talk to us.
"How can we estimate our reputation at different ISPs?"
It depends on each ISP and webmail:
- Gmail allows you to have very precise indicators on the reputation of IPs and domains via Google Postmaster Tool. We have an article that explains how to use and configure the tool.
- Microsoft proposes via its SNDS service to have an idea of the reputation of IPs on Hotmail/Outlook/...
- At the local ISP level, it is more complicated to get detailed information
- There are also reputable suppliers such as Senderscore of ReturnPath.
The other solution is to use a seedlist to see the delivery status of your emails in the different messengers. These are services that are integrated in the solutions of deliverability monitoring.
"Is the weight of the html of the email an issue in your opinion? I thought I noticed that if an email is heavy, it will be potentially truncated by gmail. The one (the code) automatically generated by editors is often considered "dirty", would you have any best practices to respect at that level without going through dev to build a template?"
Indeed, in Gmail, beyond a certain code weight, emails can be truncated in Gmail. On the other hand, at the level of pure deliverability, the weight of the code is not in itself a determining problem.
The problem of email editors integrated into the routing tools is that portions of the generated code will end up in a lot of emails from various advertisers who each have equally diverse practices.
The ideal is to have a master template email with a "clean" code. This master template can then be used to create your emails and newsletters without the disadvantages of the "drag and drop" tools of the routers.
"What is the recommended strategy when going to spam? Do you have any tips for email subject lines? "
There are two cases:
- It's a one-off incident: In this case, you must pause the sending on the problematic destination (Gmail/Microsoft/Orange/...) and investigate in order to detect when exactly the incident took place (by looking at when the opening rates collapsed on this destination) in order to see what is the source of the incident (bad targeting, irrelevant message, ...). Make sure to solve the source of the incident and restart the sending of the messages smoothly and to the most engaged recipients first.
- This is an incident that occurs regularly: Then, the concern is probably more serious and the intervention more heavy. The areas to be addressed are: quality of collection, data hygiene, targeting and segmentation, treatment of inactive people, etc.
On objects, there are lots of tips We have an old article with a good base, but we'd have to come up with some more.
"Hi, do we know the impact of our IPs being on reputation sites (e.g. barracudanerwork, junkmailfilter, etc.)? What ESPs rely on these lists to manage their spam filters?"
In fact, there are a number of sites that can be used to check your reputation. However, these are more or less important depending on the countries you're targeting and the type of target (B2B, B2C, a bit of both). For example, Apple's iCloud service uses Proofpoint's filtering services. Orange uses Cloudmark and VadeSecure services. To take another example, Barracuda will be used mainly by B2B companies. As for Junkmailfilter, I'm not familiar with them... and I don't think they're very important.
Badsender shakes up your emailing expertise!
Photo by Rohit Farmer on Unsplash
